Simonides was attending a dinner banquet when the building suddenly collapsed. He was the only survivor. The bodies were crushed beyond recognition. But Simonides was able to identify the bodies by remembering where each person had been sitting. He later realised that this technique — of associating information with places or loci — could be used to memorise all kinds of information.
Visualise yourself opening the front door of your house and realising that the doorknob is actually a banana. You walk down the hall into the kitchen and find that the kitchen table is covered in cooking oil. You can use the method of loci to remember items, points that you want to cover in a presentation, or tasks that you need to complete.
This is the tendency for your memory to improve when you devote some of your learning to retrieving the information in an active way. Active recall is vastly different from passive recall. In passive recall, you learn the material in a passive way, e. Passive recall is a necessary part of learning, but I recommend that the majority of your learning consist of active recall. Every time you come across a term or concept that you want to memorise, write it down on the front of the flashcard.
Study your flashcards at regular intervals. Chunking is a memory technique where you break down a topic into sub-topics , or a list of items into smaller groups of items. You could chunk the list down by dividing it into five sub-lists, comprising presidents from different periods of US history:. In these two examples, the principle is the same. You make the information easier to memorise by categorising it into different groups.
This approach provides the neural scaffolding that will enable you to recall the information later on. Have you ever encountered a smell or heard a song that took you back a couple of years to another place? The idea that sensory stimuli like touch, sight, and sound can aid in learning is the basis of the renowned Montessori Method.
You could also play calming classical music during your study sessions, because this has been shown to improve learning. In addition, you could try out various forms of hands-on learning — such as building models — to enhance your memory too. In spaced repetition, students review the same information at increasing intervals over time.
To implement this tip, try studying the same material over short sessions, separated by intervals that get longer over time. For example, you could do the first review within a day of learning the new information, then the next review could be three days later, then one week later, then three weeks later, etc.
Interleaving is a technique that involves learning different related skills or types of knowledge over the course of an hour or longer. For example, someone who is learning how to play basketball using the blocking approach might focus only on dribbling. Only after he has mastered dribbling will he move on to learn how to perform a chest pass.
And only after he has mastered the chest pass will he move on to learn how to perform a bounce pass. For example, in interleaving, the same basketball player might perform 15 minutes of dribbling drills, followed by 15 minutes of chest pass drills, followed by 15 minutes of bounce pass drills. For many years, educators believed that blocking was the best way to study. But recent research has shown that interleaving produces far better outcomes.
While recalling facts can be helpful, in a professional setting nothing beats deep knowledge and a profound understanding of your field. This, however, cannot be achieved by a mere recalling of things. A fact or a concept that is understood has much higher chance of sticking in your memory compared to something you just memorized. Once you introduce a sense of understanding and meaning to the things you are trying to remember, you can both remember things better and apply them in different contexts.
The building technique is mostly useful when you need to remember bigger, more complex concepts or facts. Its main key element of this method is to relate facts and concepts to each other in order to help you understand them better. Ed Cooke, a memory tournament champion and co-founder of the language app Memrise, launched an online experiment that challenged many experts in the memory field to come up with the best ways to memorize things faster.
Repetition came out as number 2 on the list. With simple concepts and words, you might have to repeat them up to 30 times before they stick for good. Bigger things, such as speeches or job presentations, might require more repetitions. Unless you are trying to memorize specific facts or words, try to understand the essence of what you are trying to memorize in order to avoid mistakes and hiccups if you forget words or mix up the order of your points. Mind maps are mostly known for their benefit in increasing creative thinking but they can be used for learning new information or simply organizing it in a more coherent way.
If you are new to your job, you can, for example, use this technique to better understand the products and services your company is offering, or even develop your own sales or marketing techniques. There is multiple online software where you can build your mind map but elaborate tools are not a necessity for this method. All you essentially need is a piece of paper and a pen. Start by putting down the central topic or idea you are trying to remember on paper, preferably expressed by one or two words.
Proceed by connecting it to sub-topics with simple lines as they relate to each other. The further away from the main topic you are, the more in detail about the topic you get.
Improving your lifestyle might not give you an overnight boost in memory but it will certainly have positive long-term effects that can make all of the above-mentioned techniques even more effective. The lifestyle improvements that might have a positive effect on your memory can largely be split into three areas: sleep, diet, and exercise.
In a study done at Harvard Medical School, participants walked briskly for one hour, twice a week for 6 months. This kind of exercise led to an increase in the size of the hippocampus, the brain area involved in verbal memory and learning. The study pointed out that it was important to engage in exercise that was challenging enough to elevate your pulse. This is important for increases blood flood to the brain that is responsible for transporting oxygen to the brain.
The group that was kept awake did significantly poorly compared to the group that got an 8-hour sleep before performing the tasks. During the night the brain seems to clear out any neuron build up from the activity it undertakes during the day, providing us with that feeling of being fresh and rested in the morning. Diet is another aspect of your life that can have either positive or negative effect on your memory. The fact that what we eat has an overall impact on our health is something many of us know but the effects a poor diet has beyond the waistline are still not widespread knowledge.
Cholesterol, which has been named the main reason for heart diseases, can also build up in your brain and restrict blood flow and thereby oxygen supply. Recently, researchers have also discovered how much the gut is connected to the brain. A troubled stomach can send signals to the brain that disrupts its normal function , and vice versa.
Our brains are not computers. They have limited power to both remember all necessary information in our lives and process it optimally. A good strategy for memorizing is to create meaningful groups that simplify the material. Now all you need to do is remember to picture a graham cracker, and the names of the plants will be easier to recall.
Use mnemonics. Mnemonics are systems and tricks that make information for memorable. One common type is when the first letter of each word in a sentence is also the first letter of each word in a list that needs to be memorized. For example, many children learned the order of operations in math by using the sentence Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally parentheses, exponents, multiply, divide, add, subtract.
Check out Wikipedia for a good list of examples and ideas. Talk to yourself. It may seem strange at first, but talking to yourself about the material you are trying to memorize can be an effective memory tool. Try speaking aloud instead of simply highlighting or rereading information. Studies show that exercise can improve our memory and learning capabilities because it helps create neurons in areas that relate to memory. Cardio and resistance training weights both have powerful effects, so do what works best for you.
Practice interleaving. Interleaving is the idea of mixing or alternating skills or concepts that you want to memorize. For example, spend some time memorizing vocabulary words for your science class and then immediately switch to studying historical dates and names for your history class. Follow that up with practicing a few math problems, and then jump back to the science definitions.
This method may seem confusing at first, but yields better results in the end than simply spending long periods of time on the same concept.
Check out this video for more explanation on interleaving and other similar strategies. Visual and spatial techniques are memory tricks that involve your five senses.
They utilize images, songs, feelings, and our bodies to help information stick. Humans have outstanding visual and spatial memory systems. When you use visual and spatial memory techniques, you use fun, memorable, and creative approaches rather than boring, rote memorization.
This makes it easier to see, feel, or hear the things you want to remember. Visual and spatial techniques also free up your working memory. When you group things together, you enhance your long-term memory. Using visual and spatial techniques helps your mind focus and pay attention when your mind would rather wander to something else. They help you make what you learn meaningful, memorable, and fun.
The common practice of using your knuckles to remember the number of days in each month is a great example of an easy visual spatial technique to help you remember details. Memorable visual images. The next time you have a key item you need to remember, try making a memorable visual image to represent that item. Images help you remember difficult concepts by tapping into visual areas.
Rather than just visualizing an image, try to smell , feel , and hear the image as well. For example, if you are trying to remember that the capital of Louisiana is Baton Rouge, draw up an image of a girl named Louise carrying a red baton.
The memory palace technique. This technique involves visualizing a familiar place—like the layout of your house or dorm room—and using it as a visual space where you can deposit concept-images that you want to remember. This technique can help with remembering unrelated items, like a grocery list.
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